David Cage and The Future of Games: More Focus on Emotions, Less on Engines

David Cage talks about the future of games, design theory puritanism, and what he'd like to see more of from the medium.

In an interview given to Edge prior to the E3 Announcement for the PS3 exclusive, Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream co-founder David Kage shared a few thoughts on the future of gaming, and the expressive potential he believes games have yet to achieve.

Kage, laments that the game industry “has been about shooting monsters for 20 years, and there are so many other things we can do than that.”

Quantic Dream’s latest offering, a seven-minute short film called Kara about a robot that gains sentience was shown at GDC to demonstrate the company’s new engine and motion-capture technology. Despite the sophistication of the tech and cinematic nature of the short, Kage says he believes the real power of games lies in their capacity for feeling, saying,

“…I think emotion is the end goal [of games], and there are many ways of achieving emotion. We can do it using storytelling, which is what we try to achieve. Or you can look at Journey, for example. It’s a very different approach, but the goal is still to create emotion and get emotional involvement from the player. People are trying many different directions, but I think emotion is the goal – storytelling is just the means.”